“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

The way things are going, this year could end up being The Great Year of Re-reading!

OK. I haven’t been posting much. Rather, I haven’t been posting anything here. I’m feeling rather vague and not very committed to doing anything at the moment, but not writing anything here leaves me feeling cranky. I want to join challenges and make lists, but I keep making excuses, so here I am rambling about nothing.

Uh.

The Great Year of Re-reading! There’s where I was. I’ll get back to that in a bit.

It’s the end of January, almost, and I still haven’t read much. Not as much as I want to, and I haven’t been paying attention much to the blog or the community lately. I am ashamed. Weekly Geeks have started again (we miss you, Dewey) and I still haven’t participated. I’ll try to cook up a post and visit after this!

Books in January

I finished a few books. Here we go with short recaps with very little chance of a longer, critical review coming forth. I’ve decided I’m bad at reviews! Links are to the respective editions at GoodReads.

1. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

I think this is the first Rushdie book I finished. I think I started The Moor’s Last Sigh but got nowhere with that one. The story is about one Salem Sinai (and his family, and more) and his overly large nose who was born at midnight on the day of India’s independence. Yes, there’s more to it than that.

I liked the book, but it took me so long to finish it. It was partly because I was busy and partly because it was a bit hard to parse.

2. Royal Escape by Georgette Heyer

This one I picked up on a whim. I saw Heyer’s books at a bookstore and thought, “Hey I know some people who love Georgette Heyer,” and their tastes were quite compatible with mine, so I stopped at the shelf. Then I noticed that Heyer was a very prolific writer and I was overwhelmed and my mind drew a blank — I couldn’t think of a single title that came recommended. I was about to walk away from the shelf when I steeled myself and looked through the books, and ended up with Royal Escape because it sounded like it had action and adventure.

And it had a lot of adventure, if not much action. The story is about the escape of Charles II from Oliver Cromwell (this is where my history fails me; I have no idea what caused what and why Charles was escaping from anyone and I’ll admit, to my shame, I didn’t really look things up even after I finished the book). It was an easy read — I finished it in two nights, reading it before I went to bed. I shall look up what actually comes recommended by Heyer and tackle that next.

3. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones

On the preliminary pages there’s a list of other Tough Guides. Which I don’t think actually exist. I saw one title: The Tough Guide to Transport in the Multiverse (mostly by Telephone Box) which made me snort with laughter — and I hadn’t even started the book proper at that point!

Despite ending up literally laughing out loud while reading the book, this one took even longer to finish than Midnight’s Children. It was funny and really, really fun . . . in small doses. It gets a bit repetitive after a while since it’s formatted like an encyclopaedia and all, especially if you read every entry. Skipping about makes it more fun, I think. (Just look up Eternal Quest; you’ll end up groaning at the definition.)

If you’ve read a lot of fantasy novels (like I have) you’ll find yourself chuckling at the clichés. Probably a good guide to have if you’re writing a fantasy novel (or trilogy, or, heaven forbid, a twelve-book cycle and die just before you finish the last one) just to make sure you’re not repeating the same things everyone has said before. XD

4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick

I am glad I liked this! I end up so frustrated when I read these so called “cult classics” or “ground-breaking novels” and end up thinking, “Well, that was OK, but what’s the fuss about?” that I’m beginning to lose faith in lists and recommendations. I like lists with many, many books in them. I like it even more if I know I can trust those lists! (Yes, I know they don’t account personal tastes and all, but I don’t really have that many friends who read who can recommend me books.)

I’ve never watched Blade Runner. Should I?

5. Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

I love this book. I have no other excuse. I don’t remember how many times I’ve reread it, but I’ve blogged about it at least once. Howl is perfectly ridiculous. Sophie being a cantankerous old lady is great fun. Calcifer and his hints — goodness, he gave a lot, didn’t he, it was just that Sophie had no idea what she was supposed to look out for.

And I’m pretty slow on the uptake. Some pieces just clicked this time around — I’ve just realised how old Howl is (a little over 27) not that it’s important but it should’ve been obvious if I had paid attention; now I wonder if we were actually told who cleft the devil’s foot. (What devil?) I am rambling. Never mind. Perhaps I’ll post again about Howl’s Moving Castle, comparing the film and the book, since I watched it the nth time with my siblings and still couldn’t make much sense of it.

What d’ya mean, re-reads?

Back to my original point about it being a year of re-reads — I’ve already re-read one book: Howl’s Moving Castle. I’m currently re-reading both Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. I’m tempted to add more but I already have too many new books on my plate.

But. BUT! Looking at the re-read for Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series going on here is leaving me tempted to re-read the books. It will probably take forever, though the target is to finish the rereading before the last book, Memory of Light, is published this fall. (Also the snark in the discussion delights me. These people love RJ and the series, but they’re willing to make fun of it and of themselves while still being analytical, and not kill each other when they’re trying to determine whether Nyneave or Egwene is the more annoying of the girls. Also there will probably be a count on how many time someone crosses her arms beneath her breasts.)

I can’t find the tenth volume of the series, Light (that’s the right terminology, yes?) help me if I could get the titles of the fifth book onwards straight. We own all the books. It’s not with any of my siblings and no one in his or her right mind would be borrowing just the tenth book in the series without reading the previous nine, so we’re kinda stumped to where it went missing. I hope it turns up when (or if) I ever get to it in the process of rereading. Which, I am gloomily predicting, will probably end up being the process of skimming-through-the-chapters-very-fast-and-getting-really-annoyed-at-the-female-characters. Jordan seems to equate “strong female characters” to “female characters who bully the dudes” and it sets me off sometimes. A lot of times. Most times, I guess. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, if ever.

Too ambitious, this rereading project. That’s what I think. But hey, why not give it a go? XD;

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Gong Xi Fa Cai, by the way. Have a good year of the ox. :)

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Atria (2006)
352 pages

Twisted fairy tales: sure, just what I was looking for. World War II background: I seem to be stumbling across a lot of books about WWII lately. A book about books: of course I want to read it. So I did.

The writing is terribly bland. It’s . . . flat. The plot was interesting, the way the myth/fairy tales were twisted were awesome, but the writing! Oh man, the writing. I’m trying to come up with another adjective, and the only one I can up with is still “flat”. I felt no connection at all with any of the characters. David did this. David did that. David is angry with his father. I don’t know. I read on because I wanted to get to the end, and also because the book came so highly recommended by so many sources. Also, it was the book not chosen by the bookclub that doesn’t exist for the month of May. (Oh man, I still need to go along and apologise for the lateness of the not-June book discussion. Which will probably be the not-June and not-July book as well. Drat.)

Anyway. The Book of Lost Things. The book is about David, a twelve-year-old boy living in England during WWII. His mother falls ill and dies, and when his father remarries and his stepmother is having a baby, David’s anger and frustration over the whole thing kinda transports him to another world, where fairy tales are twisted and he needs to find the king and the book of lost things the king has to return home. (Or something like that. Go find some other more objective summary elsewhere.)

I liked how dark the fairytale land was, and how the fairy tales were turned on their heads. My copy of the book didn’t have the appendices with the original fairy tales and explanations by Connolly and whatnot, so I am probably missing a lot of things. I don’t particularly care — I’m just glad to escape Connolly’s prose. The ending made me wince. The author seems to be intent on making sure that we know that yes, David’s changed, and yes, he will find happiness but it will be taken away from him sooner or later. Yes, we do understand that. Please be more subtle next time.

This book gave me really odd dreams. It could simply be because I was back at my parents’ house when I was reading it and sleeping in a different bed in a different room, but still, they were really weird dreams about the book. (I was reading Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game almost concurrently with this book and I didn’t dream about that book.) It wasn’t even scary — it just had the characters of the book traipsing through my dream (no David, though), all of them almost earnestly explaining why they were as they were. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall the details of their explanations — you know how dreams are. Each dream I woke up from left me even more annoyed than I was before, and as you can see, it didn’t bode well for this commentary.

Considering that this is John Connolly’s most recommended book to date, I think I’ll have to skip the rest of his works. I traded my copy with my sister’s copy of An Abundance of Katherines when I was back at my hometown. I should ask her if she enjoyed it better than I did.

The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Speak (an imprint of Puffin Books) (2007)
First published 2006
400 pages

This, to put it simply, is a re-imagining of Lewis Caroll’s Wonderland.

Fanfiction? This definitely fits the bill. An articulate explanation about fanfiction can be found here (yes, I like stealing links from other people) and this pretty much summarises my thoughts. In a more readable manner. Without flailing around. The inside back cover of the book says — jokingly, I hope — that Beddor has gone into hiding “to avoid the impassioned vigilantes at literary odds” with his trilogy. That sounds like fandom to me, yep. The only reason he’s not in (more) trouble is because the books are out of copyright.

I love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Though the Looking Glass. And, as much as I love the source material, I have nothing against Beddor for writing this — it’s an interesting premise. I think I saw someone mention somewhere that The Looking Glass Wars does to Wonderland what Wicked did for Oz: gave it a second chance. Not that I’ve read Wicked yet. While I am glad Wonderland is getting more attention again, I heartily wish that Beddor was a better writer, or had a better editor, though.

I like the idea, but the execution is terrible. (“OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!” goes the part of me which couldn’t resist making a pun of my own writing, and in Wonderland, a card soldier dies. Perhaps one of the Spades.)

It starts off with Alice Liddell storming off angrily from a perplexed Reverend Dodgson, claiming that he had ruined her story, twisted her descriptions of Wonderland. We find that she is actually Alyss Heart, the heir of the throne of Wonderland, and her Aunt Redd is bent on claiming the throne for herself. I have no real problems with the prologue, but I started off quite badly in Wonderland — I can’t like the terms. “Wonderlander” was particularly grating to me and I trip over it each time I come across it, and it’s used often, so the narrative became really stilted for me. (Well. Maybe that’s my problem and not Beddor’s, but “Wonderlander”? Why am I having such weird issues with this book. Then there is “Wondertropolis” — I nearly banged my head on my desk at this one.) And the so stark division between good and bad — White Imagination and Black Imagination — made me wince. Wonderland or not, I doubt any world is divided like a chess board.

The pacing was uneven; it was better when Alyss was in London and was Alice Liddell than it was when she returned to Wonderland. Too many info dumps too often; I don’t know why Beddor felt it necessary to rationalise everything that was nonsensical in the original story. Not that there weren’t any clever moments in the book; there were, but it gets bogged down by the bad writing.

Things picked up in the middle, and the end came quickly enough. It gets strangely Star Wars-like near the end. The dialogue could be really bad at times, especially Redd’s. Awful sound effects, too, for example: “Clangk! Skrich-onk!” No, those weren’t typos. And the book’s more focussed on action than character development; aside from Alyss, most of the characters are quite one-dimensional, and I don’t just mean the cards. Ha ha. (Whoops, there goes another card soldier.)

Well, at least the cover is sleek and well-designed. And there extra pages in the book, including colour pages and illustrations for the story. I find the coloured drawing of seven-year-old Alyss quite sweet looking, with a passing resemblance to the actual Alice Liddell. Her tutor, though, looks like a creature from Star Wars. Almost like a very tall Yoda, to be honest.

Oh well. There you go. I don’t know if this comes off as overly harsh because of my attachments to the original Alice books. I’m not sure how well the story would hold with no previous experience with Wonderland — I think it would be able to stand on its own — and I wonder what someone who hasn’t read the original books would think of The Looking Glass Wars.

Will I read the sequels? We’ll see. Seeing Redd is already out, and the third book is scheduled for a 2008 release. I’ll pick them up if I see them in the library. Can’t say I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for them, though.

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This book was recced by Rhinoa for the Herding Cats challenge.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
Greenwillow (an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books) (1998)
(First published 1996)
224 pages

Uh. I guess I am in the minority for not loving this book like most other YA fantasy fans out there? I liked it well enough; I just didn’t love it like I expected I would.

Also, I must admit I am one of those people who actually do judge a book by its cover. I believe publishers have the facility (and the responsibility!) to make covers that are both attractive and relevant to the story, and this particular cover leaves me frowning at it. I can’t make out who it’s supposed to be. I wonder if the actual target audience of the book would find the cover attractive? I certainly don’t. I wouldn’t have idly picked this one up just because of the book design, that’s for sure — it’s a good thing that I pay attention to book recommendations. ;)

The Thief is the first book in Megan Whalen Turner’s trilogy, and it’s the first book by the author I’ve read. The book is also a Newbery Honor book. It’s in the first person (which probably explains my grouses with it!) and set in world almost like a Greek version of our own. Gen, the narrator, brags that he’s the best thief ever, and ends up being caught. He’s then roped into the King’s service into stealing something really valuable.

It started off really slowly for me. I started it, got distracted because I didn’t quite care for Gen’s voice and stopped reading and had to re-start again, and only did that because it was a library book and it was due in a few days. I did finish it at one sitting once I got past the second chapter; it’s a really short book.

I was rather surprised when I found out that there were cross-recommendations from those who’ve read both The Lymond Chronicles and this series — I couldn’t quite see the similarities here, but apparently it’s more obvious in the later books. I’ll continue with The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia, I think; I’m curious enough to see what’s up next for Gen, though I’m not in a rush to check the books out now from the library.

The story’s ok. There’s nothing that I really didn’t like — it’s just that I couldn’t find anything really outstanding in the whole narrative. I like some of the characters — Pol and Sophos, mostly, and the pantheon and world-creation myths were interesting. For a narrative in the first person, Gen really holds back a lot of things from the reader. So when things fall into place, I was rather irritated with him — shouldn’t he have said something about all this sooner? Which made the ending rather problematic, at least for me. And here comes some spoilers, sorry, since this is the part that left me feeling a bit bewildered with the whole thing.

Continue reading The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner »

Starcross: A Stirring Tale of British Vim upon the Seas of Space and Time! by Philip Reeve
Illustrated by David Wyatt
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (2007)
380 pages

Oh, this left me giggling almost the whole way. Maybe it’s because the last few books I had read before it were so serious, and it was a relief to read about the more light-hearted adventures of Art and Myrtle. I loved the narrative here as much as I loved it in Larklight, and that’s saying something because stuff in the first person often rubs me the wrong way.

My copy had three lines of titles (Starcross or The Coming of the Moobs! or Our Adventures in the Fourth Dimension — A Stirring Tale of British Vim upon the Seas of Space and Time!) and I had grinned just looking at those. What other narrator could be as droll as Art? And who else would ever use the word “amanuensis” on a title page of a book? I love the title pages and the ads on the inside covers and the chapter titles — I spent a lot of time on both Larklight and Starcross studying those inside covers and the illustrations and having a laugh over them.

As for the story itself, I enjoyed Starcross better than Larklight, though I think the story was stronger in Larklight. In this instalment, we find Art and Myrtle and their mother visiting the hotel Starcross, where strange things are happening. Some old friends make a reappearance . . . and disappear in forms you won’t expect them in. The family vacation ends up with Art and Myrtle having to save the universe. (Again.)

The patriotism and the Victorian sensibilities were absurd and relevant and fun at the same time. I love Myrtle best when she forgets to be “sensible”, and her decision at the end made me cheer. I spent some time reading this book sputtering at Jack. Pirate or not, you better learn how to treat a your lady, young man! And I wonder how Art could be so smart and yet so dense when it comes to Jack/Myrtle. The footnote about how Jack must be using How to Write Love Letters: A Guide for the Perplexed to prop a wobbly table sent me choking with laughter. The joys of being young.

There will be a sequel to this, obviously. I have reliable sources saying that the sequel, Mothstorm, will be out this year. One does not leave his readers gaping at a pirate’s behaviour towards his lady friend, when said lady friend has declared Ambitions of her own. How could you leave us with such a cliffhanger, Mr Reeve!